NY Green Bank gets $210 million in funding

Gov. Andrew Cuomo Friday announced $210 million in initial funding for NY Green Bank. The funding will be used to kick-start clean energy development, to foster job growth and to help communities become more sustainable.

The funding combines $165 million redirected from other programs, with the approval of the Public Service Commission, and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’s $45 million.

The NY Green Bank is expected to open in early 2014. The proposal for a $1 billion Green Bank was part of Cuomo’s 2013 State of the State address. Financial products such as credit enhancement, loan-loss reserves and bundling of loans will be provided by private sector and green bank partnerships, officials said.

“New York’s Green Bank will target existing market barriers which currently prevent the widespread deployment of clean energy,” said Richard Kauffman, chairman of energy and finance for the state. “Given these obstacles in financing, merely setting up a competitive market that offers the promise of choice offers only that: a promise unrealized if projects cannot obtain financing.

“The Green Bank is just one component of the state’s new chapter on energy policy that focuses on enabling self-sustaining private markets and reducing dependence on subsidies.”

On Kauffman’s regional listening tour this fall, he spoke to the Rochester community about the market barriers to implementing clean energy practices.

“There’s tremendous potential in terms of markets, enormous potential in terms of technology and we actually pay pretty high electricity prices in the state, and so, boy, there’s got to be some way to migrate where we are to where we need to be,” Kauffman said during his fall visit. “One of the ways we’re going to remove market barriers is to better align all the things that we can do as a state but to connect better with the private sector.”